Motivation for a 6th, 7th, or 8th grade student can give parents a fit. Motivating a middle school student isn't rocket science, but it does take a sensitivity to understanding how adolescent brains are changing.
Around the age of 12 or 13 the brain undergoes a massive shift to get ready for the explosion of growth in adolescence. As their brain is changing, the core motivation of their personality is also emerging. In the personality tool I use to assess students' core motivation, the cutoff age for the accuracy of the assessment is between 6th and 7th grade. I'm not sure why, but I think it's due to young people as this age asking themselves two crucial questions that will define their next decade. Those two questions:
1) Who am I?
and
2) How do I fit in?
Before 6th grade, those questions of course come up, but they don't receive nearly the intensity or attention that they do starting in 7th grade. As a parent looking for ways to motivate your child, it's best to start with a sensitivity to these two questions that your child is asking him or herself.
The number one motivation for a middle school student is to find the answers to who they are and what they can accomplish intellectually and socially on their own. A lack of motivation is an indication that they don't think their efforts will be worthwhile and leads to terrible habits when it comes to getting motivated.
Parents usually take several approaches. Here are two that I see often. (I think both are valid and come with some degree of success.)
The Hands-Off Approach
The benefits of the hands-off approach is that students learn that their actions have consequences and that their parents won't rush in to save the day. The drawback is that often the day is lost and students don't develop good working habits. The other drawback I hear from parents is that they feel like they are giving up, losing control, and basically allowing their child to figure it out on their own. Sometime it works. Sometimes it's a disaster. But it's always an option, and one that is useful at times.
The Manager Approach
Directly managing students can definitely stave off disaster. The benefit is that your student will do their homework. The drawback is that it takes a lot of energy at times, feels like police work, and creates tension in the parent-child relationship. I have seen, however, students who are heavily managed experience a great degree of success later in their academic career once they internalize those habits (usually around Junior year in High School), but that's a long time to wait.
Most parents choose to take some role between those two, even bouncing between the roles consciously and communicating that decision with their child, depending on grades and missing assignments.
Here's my take on the role parents can take and understanding how to best motivate your child. The stance is a small but important shift to empowering your child with tools on how to do the task they want to accomplish then get out of the way to let them do it. I have found a remarkable number of middle school students who do want to do well in school, but they don't know how. They want to have more friends and be accepted, but they don't know how to do so. They want to be engaged, have a great relationship with their parents and teachers, but they simply don't know how to do it. Their uncertainty leads to their thinking they are terrible at, for example, getting good grades or making friends. And when someone is trying to figure out who they are in this world, that lack of ability can be painful.
The first step to motivating your middle school student is compassion.
The second is providing information. (And how to do that effectively is for the next post on 'How to Motivate a Middle School Student')
